Mr Berry is a sorrowful, Shakespeare-loving widower leading a life of quiet unfulfilment on the fringes of Blackheath in south London. Things look up when he meets Hazel, a shy young woman who runs a lace stall on the market and gives elocution lessons on the side. Glad of the companionship, Mr Berry engages her for verse-speaking sessions in exchange for items from his late wife's wardrobe.

There is only one problem - Mrs Berry isn't actually dead. Or maybe she is. Perhaps they all are - it's not easy to tell, though the one thing beyond doubt is that Edna O'Brien gives all her characters palpable dramatic life.

O'Brien's latest work is a beguiling memory play of such subtle and elusive beauty, you feel it might disintegrate if you were to put your finger on it. But the action forms a delicate tissue of loss and regret as the bewitching Hazel causes Mr Berry to reflect on the wife he has lost and the child he never had.

Braham Murray's production produces a trio of wondrous performances. Niall Buggy is an affecting, dewy-eyed Mr Berry, whose poetic soul is altogether too large for the compass of suburbia. Beth Cooke is delightfully demure as the impeccably spoken Hazel, who seems to have been taught to chew on her consonants 40 times before spitting them out. Brenda Blethyn gives an over-ripe peach of a performance as Mrs Berry, the childless supervisor of a doll factory, sustained by the sad delusion that a long-anticipated holiday will rekindle her marital ardour. Blethyn renders the line, "keep moist until seedlings are established" as a plangent reflection on infertility. Then again, she's always been the kind of actor who could make reading the instructions on a seed packet sound interesting.